Full Circle in Blackwood, NJ was my 2nd favorite record store in the 90s. If MTV walked up to you and asked about your opinion of a band in the 90s, (a then normal occurrence) you’d tell them you got the shirt at Full Circle first without hesitation, just like the guy in this video. Seriously! Where else were you getting Shonen Knife shirts? It’s where I got mine. Lotta my favorite records too. I started writing record reviews (there’s really drafts, really) and I’m trying to get through them without going off on how great this store was and how I never would’ve found that particular record any where else at that time. (Now I can refer back to this post.) The store itself still sort of exists under a different name as a video game store, with a fraction of the square footage. There was a painful to witness process where they sold off half and then half again to adjoining stores and sold more and more DVDs and games until they just changed the name or sold it completely to game guys, I don’t know.

The greatest thing about this store besides the general selection and huge used bins (thus the name), was the magazine and comicbook section. It eased my transition from comic-buying nerd to music-buying nerd. Now I never leave the house or buy anything, which is not true. But sadly it’s gotten close.

It is (of course) Shonen Knife Day. But I also found this Cibo Matto clip (same youtuber) with drummer Timo Ellis wearing a Third Street Jazz & Rock shirt:

Third Street was definitely my favorite record store of all time. It’s now a real estate office. Essentially the same store exits as AKA Music (really, no site?), but I’ve never gone there as much. (It’s only a block away from the old store, I just never find myself in Old City as much and rarely have record money when I do.) The store itself—separate from it’s inventory—was so cool at Third Street. All Jazz on the ground floor, Rock in the basement. Damn that basement was so cool. I spent the last Record Store Day at a Tunes, which is like a chain store in NJ. It’s indie, but it’s a chain store. You can’t really knock it cause they manage to survive still, but it was always on the edge of lame/cool (like, in my opinion, the idea of Record Store Day itself). I think the name AKA Music is a parody of “Tunes”, because their store is cooler and Tunes is kind of a lame name and both of these things are totally true. But I was in this store thinking, and I can only buy one record, which is ridiculous, to go into a store for an hour and buy one thing, but I’m there supporting this dying idea I still believe in for some reason. And the whole thing doesn’t feel that cool anymore, and I’m wondering how much of it is me, and how much is this particular store and whatnot. Because part of it is nostalgia, which is distorting, so I’m trying to look at it objectively.

But even the lamest CD store in the mall used to seem magical when that was the only place you could get music. It was the portal. The portal is in your room now, on the computer. Piracy is only part of it, cause you can buy all your music online as easily as steal it. I don’t see any way to give kids that magic back to a store. They try to do it with exclusives but it’s such a different thing to go somewhere only to get a limited collector’s item before it sells out. It makes records more like comics! That’s awful! Or maybe it’s not. I just had the illusion at some point in my life when I was getting into music that I was leaving Nerdland. This was it. We used to argue about if The Hulk could beat up The Thing and if Superman could outrun The Flash. Then we got into the “alternative” comics, and the gritty anti-heros. Then we got out of comics and into The Real Stuff. Zines. Punk. These guys are like real superheros doing real things. But they’re just regular guys who made different choices. And we are still nerds. No escape!

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